The limit of a vanishing shear modulus in the null‐field approach to elastodynamic scattering by bounded scatterers is investigated. It is demonstrated, for a fairly large class of surfaces and for several types of boundary conditions, that the coupling between the incident and scatteredPwaves tends to that of a corresponding acoustic scattering problem. However, by explicit examples it is also demonstrated that theP–Scoupling does not in general tend to zero rapidly enough for the amplitude of the scatteredSwave to vanish pointwise in this limit; there remains a nonzero amplitude of a wave whose wavelength goes to zero.